American Fathers 4Change with a mission of helping to bring awareness that by increasing the proportion of children growing up with involved, responsible, and committed fathers it will improve the well being of children.

"The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband." ~ Honore de Balzac

Thursday

Imagine you are in a divorce. You’ve been a dedicated parent and you aren’t a convicted felon or being accused of a crime. Now imagine walking into a local court for a procedural hearing and in a single decree your children are banned from seeing you, speaking to you or communicating in any way based solely on hearsay and allegation. Nothing’s been proven, no due process has occurred to prove anything yet a capricious judge has made a snap decision that changes the rest of your life and your children’s. What would you do?

Unfortunately this scenario is the real life experience of thousands of families across the country. An overzealous or biased Judge makes a snap decision that takes away the most important things in our lives. Whether or not you were the one seeking divorce there’s very little that parents who find themselves in this situation can do. Even when children are banned ‘temporarily’ from their parents, months can drag on to years between court dates and there’s no pause button in life. Milestones go by, alienation grows, bitterness increases and worst of all children experience immense pain and loss. Surprisingly most states have no provisions to intervene when children are banned from their parents yet this is one of the cruelest punishments that a court can levy.

While the US Constitution gives the powers of marriage, divorce and adoption to state civil courts, state civil courts simply ignore their obligations to support the civil rights protections of parents as held in the US Constitution. Parents who can’t afford attorneys can lose their children fighting spouses with access to legal assistance. Children who are the ones ‘protected’ have no say in bizarre custody decisions. Evidence standards are non-existent in family courts in the USA so children can be taken from parents purely on accusation. However, since many courts receive federal aid and recent Supreme Court cases like Turner vs. Rogers have reinforced the concept of due process in divorce many parents are turning to federal courts to seek restoration of their parental rights based on civil rights arguments.

Friday

Problem 1: Children who lose contact with their fathers do worse in life.

Problem 2: Single mothers who want to work often struggle with the cost of childcare.

Problem 3: Many non-resident fathers are without meaningful work.

All three of these problems are fairly well established in the research literature. Each also motivates a battery of policy responses, with varying degrees of efficacy. In a recent report on poverty and opportunity from a working group convened by Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute, non-resident fathers received some special attention. (I was a member of the group).

The report notes that the Child Support Enforcement Program has become increasingly effective at establishing paternity and levying child support payments. Good: parenting is a responsibility, regardless of the nature of the relationship into which a child is born. But the payments can also be onerous for non-resident parents, who are almost always fathers, ‘functioning as a tax on their earnings’. The accumulation of child support debt is a particular problem – non-resident parents are currently about $53 billion in arrears for child support – and the Brookings/AEI group suggested that these kinds of debts should be forgiven in certain circumstances.

“Failing to expect both parents to support their children is not only unfair, it reduces marriage incentives, increases poverty rates for custodial mothers and children, and is likely to hurt children,” the report concludes. But we should not make the mistake of assuming that support can only come in the form of cash.

Since most non-resident parents are fathers, there is a tendency for policy-makers to see them primarily in terms of their financial obligations, as walking ATMs. Many of these men are in no position to make serious financial contributions: 41 percent of poor non-resident fathers have been out of paid work for at least a year, according to a recent study conducted by the Urban Institute. Meanwhile, working single mothers are also struggling. Forty percent of those working said that child care costs led them to change jobs or hours worked, according to a recent survey.

So, let’s see…Lots of non-resident fathers are not gainfully employed; single mothers are struggling with childcare cost; and children, especially boys, are suffering from the distance or absence of their father. Here’s an idea: have the fathers look after their children, allowing mothers to get into and stay in work. The savings for the mother would far outweigh child support payments, which could be suspended when the father is providing childcare. What if, rather than squeezing these men for every last nickel, we were to ask them to do childcare instead?

How many fathers could help in this way? According to the National Survey of Family Growth, for the years 2006-2010, there were almost nine million non-resident fathers in the United States. We do not know for sure how many of them are not currently in paid work, but we can produce some estimates. As a group, non-resident fathers are less educated than the norm: 15 percent dropped out of high school and 38 percent have just a high school diploma. Given this educational breakdown, and assuming that non-resident fathers, on average, face the same labor market conditions as their similarly-educated peers, we estimate that 2.35 million non-resident fathers are unemployed. This figure lines up reasonably well with the Urban Institute study referred to earlier.

On paper at least, then, there is a potential reserve army of childcare workers of more than two million. Of course there are lots of reasons why this figure does not translate to the real world. Non-resident fathers are more likely to be incarcerated; they may have addiction or substance abuse problems; and they may be wholly unsuited, in some way, for caring for their own children. Some may not live close-by. But even so, there must be many fathers who could be doing more care. Many of these men might object to doing the unpaid work of raising their children, even if their child support payments were waived. But if they are not active in the labor market, it is hard to see why they ought to take this view: we are talking about their own children, after all.

Right now, the childcare contribution of non-resident fathers is very low, accounting for just 6 percent of total time when the mother is in a single-parent household, and just 1 percent of total time when the mothers is living with a boyfriend, according to research by Ariel Kalil, from the University of Chicago.

No doubt there are practical obstacles to increasing the amount of care provided by non-resident fathers, including some of those discussed above. But perhaps the greatest barrier is the outdated mental model with which these problems are addressed. As my colleague Isabel Sawhill and I argued in a recent New York Times piece (‘Men’s Lib!’), we urgently need to break down outdated gender roles if both men and women are to flourish. Seeing non-resident fathers as potential caregivers is one step in this direction. After all, women can now serve in every role in the U.S. military, so why can’t we start to see men performing a bigger role as parents?

Richard V. Reeves is Policy Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.

Clark, who identifies herself as a “Floridian-American,” claims that her civil rights were violated five years ago when she was arrested for plotting to break the father of her baby out of prison.

Fittingly, her memo is full of what is, to say the least, a dismissive attitude towards Judge Willis Hunt and other agents of the government.

“You think because you sit up there in that little black robe hiding behind the ignorance of the masses like a little b*tch, that ANYBODY gives a d*mn about you or what you have to say?” Clark says. “Well, just in case you haven’t noticed-I couldn’t give two f*cks about you or what you have to say. F*ck you, old man. You’re a joke. Your court’s a joke. You take it up the a*s; and you suck nuts. Lol.”

Sunday

"Keith Harmon Snow's meticulously documented investigation into sex-trafficking of children by American judges is not to be missed... I might not believe what Mr. Snow has written if I had not independently investigated two dozen cases not discussed in his article, and found ample evidence of the precise dynamics he lays out for us here. Anyone who says they care about child welfare needs to learn what is happening in family courts and take action until it is stopped. Once you start reading this exposé, you won't be able to put it down."--Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?

"It is a national scandal that family courts systematically fail to protect children from physical and/or sexual abuse by a predatory parent. What is equally scandalous is the silence of the mainstream media to cover the issue... With luck, when reporters like Keith Harmon Snow shine a light on the grave injustices taking place in family courts, Americans will be filled with a sense of responsibility and take action to protect children from family court abuses."--Garland WallerProducer, No Way Out But One

"If you are facing the Family Law or Dependency Courts, do not enter until you have read this book by Keith Harmon Snow. We won my daughter's case and protected my grandchildren with the help of the article that led to this book." -- Lori Johnson, Los Angeles

For women under 30, who bear two-thirds of all children, that rate is 53 percent.

Many unmarried women are cohabiting with partners at the outset of their children’s births, but those couplings disintegrate at twice the rate of marriages.

In total, about one-third of all children are raised in father-absent homes. By some estimates, this means more kids are growing up with televisions in their bedroom than with both of their biological parents. Boys are especially affected by this trend. Without positive and consistent male role models, society misses out on much of their constructive potential. It’s no coincidence 70 percent of male inmates did not grow up with both parents, for example.

Even for those with fathers, the average school-age boy spends just half an hour per week in one-on-one conversation with his father, according to David Walsh, founder of Mind Positive Parenting.

“That compares with 44 hours a week in front of a television, video game screen, [and] Internet screen,” he says. “I think that we are neglecting our boys tremendously. The result of that is our boys aren’t spending time with mentors, with elders, who can really show them the path, show them the way of how it is that we’re supposed to behave as healthy men.”

Across the board, children with intact families have more advantages than their fatherless peers. A report published byThe Center for Disease Control and Preventionsays children of married biological parents or adoptive parents are healthier, have fewer definite or severe emotional or behavioral difficulties and are less likely to grow up in poverty. They also have more friends. When Gen-Y children were surveyed in elementary school, those who were living with their fathers scored better on 21 of 27 social competence measures.

The charts below illustrate this point:

The US Is Leading The Way In Fatherlessness And It's Hurting Our Kids

On average, a little over 3 million children in the US receive welfare benefits, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or State Supplemental Program (SSP), each month during the fiscal year. A recent report from Pew Research indicated 18 percent of American adults have received assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or “food stamps,” at some point in their lives, and Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to have used food stamps. Women were about twice as likely as men, and black people were twice as likely as white people to have received food stamps.

Paramount Pictures

People over 65 years old were the least likely age group to say they had received food stamps, while people with less education – a high school diploma or lower – were three times more likely than college graduates to have received those benefits. Women who marry or maintain a home with the biological father of their children can face the reduction or loss of their benefits, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services:

“Our main finding is that if a male has financial resources, TANF provides the greatest disincentive to form and/or maintain a biological family, and the least disincentive, if not an incentive, to form an unrelated cohabitor family. In a biological family, where the male is the father of all the children, he must be included in the unit and his resources counted. In an unrelated cohabitor family, where he is father of none of the children, he is not included and his resources are not counted. In addition, most states disregard unrelated cohabitor vendor and cash payments to the TANF recipient and her children.”

In other words, the current structure of TANF actually promotes having nearly any man but the biological father heading the house. Women are also about six times likelier to get sole custody of their children after separating from their fathers. In some cases, men even go to jail for falling behind on child support payments. In South Carolina, for example, about one out of seven inmates are imprisoned for this very reason, and 75 percent of them were unemployed or having trouble finding work. How sending them to jail will help them, their families, or taxpayers is a mystery. And. again, for children with fathers, dads are missing out on crucial bonding time. Children who had frequent and positive interactions with their fathers, such as the father paying attention to the child’s interests, offering encouragement and smiling, during the first year of their lives were calmer and better behaved than other children at age two. This was especially true for boys. Involved dads also reduce the chances of their infants experiencing cognitive delays, and fathers themselves feel more confident about their job skills, parenting skills and social relationships. The US is an oddity among Western nations in not granting statutory paid maternity or paternity leave or providing childcare at a reasonable cost. This creates a situation where women are forced to choose between work and family (to “lean in” or “lean out”), while men have no option but to “lean in” or just opt out altogether.

These trends paint a very disconnected picture, but that can change. The government can step up by commissioning a White House Council on Boys and Men. There is currently a White House Council on Girls and Women, but they have yet to support a similar platform for men, even though it has been proposed and endorsed by a number of experts. Creating policies that support a father’s right to be present in his children’s lives during divorce and custody battle situations, eliminating perverse welfare incentives for parents to live apart, offering men paternity leave equal to maternity leave, providing childcare for both mothers and fathers and encouraging family members to visit inmates would also be steps in the right direction. Sponsoring a nationwide male mentorship program to bring more positive male figures into children’s lives would also help reverse these trends.

Friday

Thanks for visiting our site! Like most individuals you have probably come to our site for one primary reason. You are looking for answers to a specific Fathers rightsfamily law problem. Let me assure you that you've come to the right place. We have the answers you need!

The subject of this article is "Why Do Men Lose In Family Court?" I have spent the last 23 years attempting to answer this question. After considerable research, case evaluations and client interviews I believe I now have the answer.

Twenty three years ago I went through a brutal divorce. Actually, at the time of divorce we were very friendly with one another and agreed to settle out of court. My Ex-wife, through a paralegal filed for divorce and like most men I simply agreed to the terms. I walked away with nothing! I surrendered the house, ($40,000.00 in equity) the boat, the car, furniture etc. etc...Everything I had acquired in 13 years of marriage was suddenly gone. We had three children and I wanted them to have the benefit of these items. Although I didn't realize it at the time I could have and should have made better agreements that would have benefited all members of my family in a much greater way. Looking back I simply didn't know what a good agreement was or how to make the deal. I was so concerned about maintaining a good relationship with my ex that I avoided anything that might have resulted in a legal battle. I should have filed my response with the court and requested an equitabledivision of property, custody, visitation and a support order that was based on my Real income. In general I should have been more attentive to the legal issues. This was truly a mistake!

Like most men I had adopted the common belief that men always lose in divorce proceedings so why not just surrender everything now and avoid the inevitable. What I didn't realize at the time was that I wasn't doing anyone any favors by surrendering everything to my ex-wife. Ignorantly giving up my property caused my wife to develop a false confidence in the legal system that would soon allow her to sue me again and again and again. Like many women she understood the prevailing thought of men that they always lose in family court and she capitalized on this belief. Therefore it didn't matter any longer how much I had given to her the fact that I didn't know what I was doing was extremely obvious. Despite everything I had surrendered, ignorantly failing to make fair and equitable agreements at the time of my departure from the family home was a colossal mistake and was a personal invitation for her to sue me later. I would in time realize that money and property are no substitute for a well-written, fair and equitable agreement of ALL issues. Like the American Express advertisement declares "Don't leave home without it!"

I had also surrendered a number of other rights simply because I was ignorant and wasn't aware of the significance of these rights. Mainly rights to my children. I had mistakenly believed that women always get custody of children and Dads always get the standard every other weekend visitation schedule. In fact I was so ignorant I actually thought this was the law! Little did I realize that even after I had given everything I had, I would still have to give more.

Monday

Saturday, June 4th is the last day for new callers to register for our international support call seminar with Dr. Bob Evans. Regular callers have until Sunday, June 5th at 6 PM EDT to register. These are firm deadlines! To register, please email familyaccessinnc@aol.com.

Trying to understand all of this can be difficult at best. There are also many significant issues surrounding custody evaluations in parental alienation cases as well. And let us not forget the grandparents dealing with these issues too.

Our June call will focus much on these issues as well as your questions that you submitted and Dr. Evans is now looking over.

We are extremely fortunate to have the leading experts in the world on alienation to do these seminar calls for us at no charge to us. This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us to glean from them and help us and our families. Please take advantage of these calls. They are a tremendous help.

The calls are now set up for all countries to participate. We have a local number for all countries except Canada. Canada uses the US number and info. We also Skype our calls as well. Looking forward to you joining us.

I need 10 Beta Testers. We are Justice for Fathers - and we have a new community that we plan on launching for Fathers Day 2016. Our goal is to reward all Members so that they can pay their child support and or other expenses. Justice For Fathers dies not bash Mothers. We are here to find a cure for Parental Alienation Syndrome - a form of child abuse. Join our Community as a Personal Mentor and start earning Big. As a gift, use the coupon code: DO THE MATH at checkout to get started for only $35. You must agree to refer 10 other paid members at any level. Join us at: www.justiceforfathers.com/join

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"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." (Tecumseh).

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Tell Your Story

We always encourage all parents and extended family to share information about Family Court horrors, or Parental Alienation and its impact on you, your children and family, so that the ripple effect of sharing information and experiences create positive change for other people who are affected or who may be affected in the future.

This blog was viewed over 100,000 times. Comments by visitors, in contrast, were fewer than 600. For the public to be aware of procedural abuses, it has to hear about them. (The blog author’s own story is here.)

Call yourself whatever you want (or nothing at all). Email addresses are strictly confidential, and providing one is optional (but will allow you to be notified of others’ responses and to dialogue immediately if you wish).

The Communications Decency Act exempts this blog’s author from any liability for what you say. Civility is the only constraint upon your speech.

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Fathers have become undervalued, family structure has become disposable, children suffer without both parents but so often father is left out, seen as nonessential. Let's correct this by bringing attention to it! We're happy to populate the Internet with information that is helpful, supportive, and conducive to fostering father-child relationships, reducing or eliminating Parental Alienation, for the betterment of our children's psychological and emotional health, and for the future health of our families and societies.

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